I think I'm a part of the first generation of journalists to skip print media entirely, and I've learned a lot these last few years at Forbes. My work has appeared on TVOvermind, IGN, and most importantly, a segment on The Colbert Report at one point. Feel free to follow me on Twitter or on Facebook, write me on Facebook or just email at paultassi(at)gmail(dot)com. I'm also almost finished with my sci-fi novel series, The Earthborn Trilogy.

The Idiocy of Blaming Video Games for the Norway Massacre

How many times are we going to do this? Really now, it’s getting absurd.

I’m old enough to have Columbine burned into my mind forever, as I was a teen myself when the massacre took place. The media immediately looked for answers, and found them in the fact that the killers sometimes played Doom.

Then there was Virginia Tech, an even worse slaughter by a young man. I’ll never forget this moment in an on-camera interview with two of the killer’s roommates. I can’t recall the exact wording, but it went something like:

Interviewer: What did he do when you were living with him? Did you ever see him playing video games on his computer?

Roommate: No, he really just spent all his time typing in Word.

Interviewer: You’re sure? He never played any violent video games at all?

Roommate: No, he just wrote all the time.

It was assumed games were a cause of the violence before it was even established if he’d played them or not, which he hadn’t.

Now we have the case of Norway mass murderer Ander Behring Breivik. In this case, he says that he not only was a big World of Warcraft player, but he used Call of Duty to “train” for the massacre. As such, we now have headlines like this:

It’s still astonishing to me how supposedly smart individuals in the media persist in blaming video games for atrocities of this nature. To say that Call of Duty was a significant factor in these murders ignores the fact that there are probably 10 million COD players that did NOT go on a mass killing spree last year. In fact, only one did. I’m not a statistics major, but I think we’re in logic hell here. Perhaps we should also examine his toothpaste brand and shoe preference as well? Could those have driven him to these horrible acts?

The obvious notion is that someone with a deranged mind who wants to kill would be drawn to a violent game, as they would other violent media. But this idea that violent media drives people to kill is a notion that keeps being repeated year after year, despite no factual evidence supporting it. It’s a misguided thought championed by people who don’t know the difference between correlation and causation.

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Thanks for this, Paul. You really hit the nail on the head. Video games are just the latest in a long line of scapegoats that the media uses to “explain” these tragedies. And unfortunately, until people who have had video games as a constant feature of their entire lives are in those positions, this same idiocy will continue. Of course, once we’re making the headlines, there’s every possibility that we’ll be blaming the next new thing for all the world’s ills. It’s kinda sad.

Couldn’t agree more – and I’d say we’re already moving into the next generation of moral panics. In the 50s we had Fredric Wertham warning that comic books turned children into psychotic maniacs and led to the destruction of the American family. In the 60s we had moral panics about too much TV destroying the American family. Video games really hit their stride in the 80s, and the lurid headlines have been going on pretty much since then.

Mobile phones became accessible to everyday people in the 90s, after the launch of 2G networks, and that was followed by panics about health risks and (you guessed it) the destruction of the American family.

Streaming video and broadband access really took off around the turn of the century; I’m sure the first articles about Internet porn causing murders, psychosis and the destruction of the American Family appeared within about five minutes of RealPlayer…

Good points Daniel. I guess it’s more bothersome to me that video games are the current villain just because I’ve been a gamer since I was four (when I got the NES). It’s been a part of my life, and my friends’ and family’s lives, forever. Even if there is an argument to be made that violent video games can adversely affect someone who is already “there” (mentally unstable, violent, aggressive, etc.), isn’t it more important to address those issues that are the actual problem? This is like blaming alcohol for drunk driving accidents, or guns for shootings. I’m not saying that they don’t contribute, but that doesn’t mean that no one should ever be allowed to own a gun, beer, or a video game. It means that we should address the people who clearly can’t handle those things.

You make some great points! It seems every generation has the next thing that will “destroy the American Family.” Unfortunately, some of the moral panics you mentioned have lead to families being destroyed, but the cause was not the panic in and of itself. The cause came from the individual USING the medium in a destructive manner.

I think that is the point large areas of media largely miss. Video games are not inherently evil. The same goes with comic books, or mobile phones. It is impossible for those things to actually be evil. They have no living spirit. Elements in those particular mediums that are outside our comfort zones can give them the appearance of feeling evil, but it is not possible for them to actually be evil.

I find it amazing the self-imposed ignorance to certain truths. As people, we want to be viewed as intelligent, or at the very least, well-informed. But through the magic of denial, we can completely destroy that image.

Well, not even Anders Breivik claimed that World of Warcraft was training – that’s just journalists getting their facts mixed up. His line is that Modern Warfare helped him to learn target acquisition, but that World of Warcraft was just a hobby.

Of course, he is probably insane, and indubitably a mass murderer. So, possibly his insights on the utility of video games as training tools should be taken with a degree of skepticism. It’s perhaps more pertinent that he belonged to a shooting club and went on several training courses on how to use actual firearms in the real world.

“The obvious notion is that someone with a deranged mind who wants to kill would be drawn to a violent game” I have been saying exactly this for years and it baffles me that anyone with even a meagre intelligence could fail to see it for themselves.

Unfortunately journalists are like politicians in that their livelihood depends on how many people they can get to listen to what they say. This is why neither let facts get in the way of a good scaremongering.